The Homeric Question

The idea of a wide gap separating the Mycenaean Age from
the historical age of Greece has gained almost universal acceptance since
it was first advanced more than a century ago. Because no literary documents
and almost no signs of culture could be found for that long period, it
came to be known as the Dark Age.

Hellenists and historians in general use the term Dark
Age for the twelfth, eleventh, tenth, ninth, and most of the eighth centuries,
or the period that lies between the Mycenaean and Archaic ages, the latter
being the opening of the Ionian period that in due course developed into
the Classical period. The time from about -1200 to -750 is the Dark Age
in continental Greece, on the Aegean islands and shores, and in the interior
of Asia Minor. The reader may think that the term is bequeathed to us
from ancient times, from Greek historians or philosophers of the classical
period. The fact, however, is that no Greek historian, philosopher, or
poet used the term Dark Age or dark centuries or any substitute for such
a concept; nor did Roman writers, much occupied with the Greek past, have
a concept of a Dark Age for the period following the Trojan War and preceding
the historical age in Greece. The term, and the concept as well, are a
creation of modern scholarship in Hellenic studies for the period from
which we have neither history, nor literary remains.

If, as most scholars now believe, Homer lived and created
at the end of the eighth or the beginning of the seventh century, and
if the Trojan War took place just before the beginning of the Dark Age,
he could hardly have omitted to refer in some direct or only indirect
way to the more than four centuries of the Dark Age that separated him
from the epic events he described. Why did no poetand Greece had
manyever mention a lengthy Dark Age, if only in passing? Neither
Herodotus, nor Thucydides,1 nor Xenophonthe Greek historianshad anything
to say about a four or five centuries span that separated the Greek
history from the Mycenaean. Greece had also many outstanding philosophers;
then how are we to explain that a periodnot covering just a few
decades, but more than four centuriesis passed over in silence by
Greek poets, philosophers and historians alike? Should not Aristotle or,
much later, Diodorus of Sicily or Pausanias in their voluminous writings
have devoted as much as a single passage to the Dark Ageif there
was one? Neither the Roman writers, nor the chronographers of the Renaissance,
applied themselves to the illumination of the Dark centuries, and it is
only since the last decades of the nineteenth century that the term Dark
Age in Greek history has been used.

Despite being separated by five centuries from the Mycenaean
civilization of which he sings, Homer displays a surprising knowledge
of details no longer existent in the Greek world of his day:

We know from the archaeological evidence that Homer attempts
to archaeologize, even to take us into the Mycenaean Age . . . yet in
Homers day there was no science of archaeology, no written history
to assist the historical novelist. Where then did he get these details
from the past?

As an example of such knowledge, the author cites Homers
description of Nestors cup with doves on its handles, a description
that fits a vessel actually disinterred in the Mycenaean strata which
according to the conventionally written history were deposited some five
centuries before Homer began to compose his epics.

The technique of metal inlay of the shield of Achillesdescribed
by Homer in the Iliadwas practiced in Greece in the Bronze Age and
disappeared before its close, and apparently never returned there.
The boars tusk helmet described by Homer was reconstituted by Reichel
from slivers of tusk found in many Bronze Age graves. It is difficult
to imagine Homer transmitting a description of an object which we could
not visualize . . . For four centuries at least no one could possibly
have seen a boars tusk helmet . . .

On the other hand in Homer are found descriptions of objects
which cannot have found a place there before the 7th century.
One such object is the clasp which fastened the cloak of Odysseus when
on his way to Troy. It points to the second decade of the 7th century
as the time of the composition of the Odyssey (unless it is an interpolation,
the dates of which could not be much earlier or later than the first half
of the 7th century).

If the Mycenaean Age closed with the twelfth century and
Homer composed at the end of the eighth, four and a half centuries constitute
a hiatus, and separate the poet from the objects he describes.

The blending of elements testifying to the Mycenaean Age
together with elements the age of which could not precede the seventh
and certainly not the eighth century is a characteristic feature of the
Iliad. Some scholars have expended enormous efforts in trying to separate
passages of the epics and ascribe their authorship to different generations
of poets, from contemporaries of the events to the final editor of the
poems in the seventh century. But all these efforts were spent unprofitably,
and their authors at the end of their labors usually declared their perplexity.
The following evaluation is from the pen of M. P. Nilsson:

To sum up. There is considerable evidence in Homer
which without any doubt refers to the Mycenaean Age. . . The Homeric poems
contain elements from widely differing ages. The most bewildering fact
is, however, that the Mycenaean elements are not distributed according
to the age of the strata in the poems. Nilsson continued: The
Mycenaean and the orientalizing elements differ in age by more than half
a millennium. They are inextricably blended. How is it credible that the
former elements were preserved through the centuries and incorporated
in poems whose composition may be about half a millennium later?3

References

[A passage from the first book
of Thucydides Peloponnesian Wars (I.17) which tells of
a period of political chaos and economic deprivation after the fall
of Troy, is sometimes cited as a reference to the Dark Ages. That
the end of the Mycenaean Age was followed by several decades of migrations
and poverty is a fact that is discussed at some length below (section
A Gap Closed). But Thucydides
words cannot be construed as referring to a period of time longer
than a century.]